Wednesday, April 2, 2003

The following journal note, from the day after Sinatra died, was written before I heard of his death. Note particularly the quote from Rilke. Other material was suggested, in part, by Alasdair Gray’s Glasgow novel 1982Janine. The “Sein Feld” heading is a reference to the Seinfeld final episode, which aired May 14, 1998. The first column contains a reference to angels — apparently Hell’s Angels — and the second column provides a somewhat more serious look at this theological topic.

PA lottery May 14, 1998:256S8The group of all projectivities and correlations of PG(3,2).The above isomorphism implies the geometry of the Mathieu group M24.“The Leech lattice is a blown-up version ofS(5,8,24).”— W. Feit“We have strong evidence that the creator of the universe loves symmetry.”— Freeman Dyson“Mackey presents eight axioms from which he deduces the [quantum] theory.”— M. Schechter“Theology is about words; science is about things.“— Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books, 5/28/98What is “256” about?

Tape purchased 12/23/97:

DjangoReinhardtGypsy Jazz

“In the middle of 1982Janine there are pages in which Jock McLeish is fighting with drugs and alcohol, attempting to either die or come through and get free of his fantasies. In his delirium, he hears the voice of God, which enters in small print, pushing against the larger type of his ravings. Something God says is repeated on the first and last pages of Unlikely Stories, Mostly, complete with illustration and the words ‘Scotland 1984’ beside it. God’s statement is ‘Work as if you were in the early days of a better nation.’ It is the inherent optimism in that statement that perhaps best captures the strength of Aladair Gray’s fiction, its straightforwardness and exuberance.”— Toby Olson, “Eros in Glasgow,” in Book World, The Washington Post, December 16, 1984

For another look at angels, see “Winging It,” by Christopher R. Miller, The New York Times Book Review Bookend page for Sunday, May 24, 1998. May 24 is the feast day of Sara (also known by the Hindu name Kali), patron saint of Gypsies.

For another, later (July 16, 1998) reply to Dyson, from a source better known than myself, see Why Religion Matters, by Huston Smith, Harper Collins, 2001, page 66.

"Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without being right next to it, then the effect in question must be in direct—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition 'locality.'

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one."